Inside the IDW layoffs and "reset": How a company went from making "a shit-ton of money" to worrying about bankruptcy

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As the dust continues to settle on the massive and sudden wave of layoffs that struck IDW Media Holdings (and its subsidiaries IDW Publishing and IDW Entertainment) on April 27 – a slate of dismissals that saw approximately 39% of the company’s workforce let go over the course of a single day – the facts are still slowly becoming clear about what happened. Even as IDW issued a press release on May 3 (its first public statement since the upheaval a week earlier) announcing what the company had previously dubbed a “reset” for the publishing division under a new leadership of both new hires and remaining staff, many of those dismissed from the company are still struggling to make sense of the how and why of their abrupt termination.

Although IDW’s former employees are almost universally reticent to speak openly and on the record (lest their comments harm prospects with future employers), Popverse has been able to speak with several of the laid-off IDW employees across multiple divisions, who together helped assemble a fuller portrait of one of the more jarring single days in recent comic industry news.

At the same time, Popverse has been speaking to current IDW staff about the situation, including senior figures within the company including the newly-hired CEO Davidi Jonas (whose family owns a majority percentage of the company).

The writing was on the wall for IDW, possibly as early as 2021

According to one source at the company who was among management before the layoffs, the murmurings of bad news on the horizon began some time before the actual wave of layoffs, following the release of IDW’s latest financial report on March 15, 2023; a report which revealed a loss from IDW Publishing of $335,000 in its first fiscal quarter, which ended on January 31.

"And for at least a year and a half if not longer, it has been very, very much known that IDW Entertainment was going to make a shit-ton of money in 2022, and [IDW Entertainment is] not going to make any money in 2023. None of that is a surprise: they knew that at the end of 2021.”

“We knew something was up. We knew some changes were coming,” the former employee tells Popverse. “The entire Board changed over, Davidi Jonas had come in [to the Board of Directors] on March 30…it was very clear that that was going to happen. So none of this was a surprise. It was clear that Davidi and other people were here to bring some kind of change. And for at least a year and a half if not longer, it